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PowerShell: Fixing “Windows could not connect to the Group Policy Client service”

My wife got this error the other day on her Windows 10 machine when trying to login.  After a bit of digging, it seems it’s not unheard of but there’s no clear answer about why it happens (It’s a corrupted / missing set of registry entries.  The cause could be a bad shut-down, crash, interrupted update or pre-cursor to Martian attack.  Who knows.)

I found a good site that provides a solution. To fix the issue you need to create a registry sub-key and value (confusingly, both of the same name) and a pair of values under the sub-key you just created. That cures the problem but there’s no more information about to how to prevent it happening again.

In lieu of a proper preventative solution I wrote a script to perform the changes (with a bit of safety code too) so if it re-occurs I’m good to go.

Script and walk-through after the line. Continue reading “PowerShell: Fixing “Windows could not connect to the Group Policy Client service””

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What does your computer hear when it listens without you knowing?

HALA lot of people are worried about computers listening in to what you’re doing.  Some of the people’s points are valid, while others come across as totally paranoid.  But what does your computer hear in the background?

I left my copy of VoiceAttack going after I finished playing Elite without realising it.  I didn’t have my mic on but it was live on my desk.  VoiceAttack uses the speech recognition system built into Windows and this is what my PC thought I was saying… Continue reading “What does your computer hear when it listens without you knowing?”

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PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders) Part 4

Some more additions to the script.  In this part I add some additional configuration options, parameter validation and some error-checking.

Update : I’ve revisited this script a few times with new additions and modifications.The latest full version of the script is here.  That post also includes links covering the other revisions to the script.

Continue reading “PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders) Part 4”

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Things I Didn’t Expect from the Overwatch Beta Weekend…

Overwatch

I lucked out last weekend and got invited into the Overwatch stress test.  Overwatch is on my “games that might make me giddy” list so I was willing to sacrifice myself to help stress-test Blizzard’s servers.

For the greater good, you see.

There’s plenty written about the game already so I thought I’d write down where I found the game surprising. Continue reading “Things I Didn’t Expect from the Overwatch Beta Weekend…”

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PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders) Part 3

I’ve used the Sync-Folder script quite a bit and I thought it might be time to revisit it, clean it up and add some more functionality.

Here’s what I’m adding in this first part;

  1. Load all the configuration from an XML file.  Useful to allow more complex configurations and a lot easier to edit that parameters or local variables.
  2. Proper documentation (so that Get-Help returns useful information).
  3. Allow multiple Source / Target pairs instead of just the one source folder.   Multiple copies of the same source is good for extra safe backups.

The script and explanation follows after the line.

Update : I’ve revisited this script a few times with new additions and modifications.The latest full version of the script is here.  That post also includes links covering the other revisions to the script.

Continue reading “PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders) Part 3”